Saturday, September 21, 2013

Number Talks and Math Workshops!

First of all, I again have to say I am so excited, blessed and very thankful for this year. I have such a great group of students and they are rocking and rolling already. Every day is a joy to go to school. Let's just say last year was a little rougher. Oh, the stories I could tell.....

With that being said, my personal goal this year is to grow and to become a better Math teacher. Reading is my thing, but I know I can do this. I am so excited to share about what we are doing in Math in our classroom. Our district uses Investigations Math and I like it... but also love to add and put my own spin on things. Groovy, right??

I first want to share this great idea I pinned this summer and have been amazed at the Number Talks that we have been having. I wish I knew who this idea came from, but my pin was just linked to a pic. (I hate when that happens). Here is what my Number charts look like ( Don't laugh at my pictures... Okay, you can laugh, we often do in class). I am in no way an artist, but just writing/ drawing the number thoughts that my students have:

Frontloading my kiddos with these great talks about numbers and getting a good sense of the many ways to represent numbers will help us a lot when we begin really hitting addition and subtraction later in the year. I have been amazed at their thoughts and how well they are beginning to understand numeracy and good number sense. Throughout this process, they have come up with ideas on their own. The domino idea was not one I had even thought of yet. It was awesome this week as one of my kiddos said, "Well, Mrs. Garrett, of course we could compose and decompose #8" instead of "that two color marker thing" LOL. After our number talks, we either do a math journal activity or we do Exploring Numbers 1 -10 Practice. When we work in our Math Journals - students are given a thought/ idea and then asked to represent that. ex. " How many students are sitting at your table? How can you show your answer? " I just love these Math Journals. When we work on Exploring Numbers, students complete a worksheet that gives them many opportunities to explore that number. Exploring Numbers 0-10 can be found here in my TpT store.

After this in Math, we will have a short lesson from Investigations. Right now, it is all about Counting and Cardinality. Then we go to our Math Workshops. My students love this time and I love watching them grow as Mathematicians. I took a lot of my Math Workshop ideas from Deanna Jump ( I have a whole folder just dedicated to DJ - love her) and her Math Magic Activities Set. Can I just say AMAZING!! You can find it here.

I also am just a researcher and am constantly, reading, pinning ideas and activities and thinking "What is it my students need most of. . I do work to keep it simple and easy to manage though. One of the things I have discovered this week is that my students are struggling a lot with number words. ( One to Five have been added to our sight word list this year and we have been introducing one number word a week with our other sight words). So coming up this week, I will be putting some number word work into our Math Workshops as well. I created this Number Words Work and Activities to address this need. You can find it here.

Thank you for visiting my blog and I hope that you are continuing to grow as well. I was reminded by my Trainer this week that if you aren't growing, you are dying! I thought I was dying when she was done with me. LOL